


We Could Walk Right Out

by Synergic



Category: Dreamboy (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, M/M, POV First Person, Post-Canon, canon-typical stream of consciousness, only rated T because it's Dreamboy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:47:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28058661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Synergic/pseuds/Synergic
Summary: These bones are warm.
Relationships: Dane/Luke (Dreamboy)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 8
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	We Could Walk Right Out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vexbatch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vexbatch/gifts).



I’m dreaming again.

It’s funny, because— okay, I think on some level whenever shit gets really messed up your sleeping brain starts to go like: “yeah, no, this can’t be real,” and sometimes Dream You even takes control and magics away the freaky ax murderer’s pants or makes it so you can fly. Then suddenly you're bobbing around like a drunken, deflating balloon making its escape from a five year-old's birthday, floating your way out of your own BS brainfogged mess. But this is something else. Crisp, the way that films are because the camera gets the option of only focusing on important details. Hyper-saturated, except that it's not just colors, it's everything. Taste and smell and the absence of light when I close my eyes. That's how I know I can't possibly be awake.

That and the fact that I’m back inside Dreamboy II.

I’m way, way further down in the fish this time, but it isn't a problem for me. It's like . . . now that I know the truth about it, the dunkleosteus’ body can’t quite hold itself together anymore? Imagine one of those cheap paper lanterns, the type that are two for five bucks down in chinatown. And sure they've got nicer ones but you're broke. This is fine. Only once you get them home, you realize that they cost practically nothing because Pearl River Mart doesn't give you a lightbulb or anything; the inside of this lamp is just a piece of wire with a cheap janky socket held between two prongs. So maybe you hang them up for decoration anyway, but you don’t actually use them until years later. 

Then you flip that light on for the first time ever, and you remember that what you’re used to thinking of as a sphere— a big beach ball of pulpy paper —is actually made up of ten or twenty flat discs. And now you can see the shadows of lantern-ribs all over your bedroom. Like the walls are an even bigger lamp and you’re the bulb. 

I reach out and tap one of the dunkleosteus’ ribs too. I guess to see if logic will reassert itself, and I’ll feel meat or skin or whatever should be this far down a creepy prehistoric fish’s gullet. But I don’t. 

I feel bone, but it’s not. . . cold. Even though some part of me now knows the dunkleosteus is dead, that its body is rooted in cold damp mud like the underside of a tree or a pile of non-biodegradable garbage that some asshole has dumped in a drainage ditch. Even though the water outside is still _totally_ dark and— speckled? —with little flashes of trailing light that look like stars or the glint of windows catching the sunlight, but are probably bioluminescent sea creatures. Or maybe they’re not, I don’t know. But whether we’re in the sky or the totally forgotten sea, it should be cold, right? It’s got to be. But these bones are warm. Like they’d been baking in an oven. And they make— sounds. When I touch them. Not rapping or scraping. They kind of hum? Like a cartoon xylophone. 

So I start to play them. 

It’s hard once I’m more than a few notes in. I have to jump from foot to foot like some kind of ungainly ape-man. But I can’t stop. It’s almost like the song is playing _me_ at this point.

And somewhere far in the back of this monster fish’s throat, I hear the beginnings of a giant hum— 

\----

And then I wake up. My hands on the keys of Cora’s wooden player piano. 

\----

When Emily came back, I wasn’t exactly ready to leave Cleveland. So Cora offered me her spare bedroom. 

Maybe? If she’d called it what it was, I wouldn’t have said yes. It’s not spare, it’s just not being used anymore. Not by anyone living anyway. It was her mother's bedroom. Fuck, it’s probably the room that Mr. Stonefall’s first wife bled out in, way back when the house was new. Although that part doesn’t bother me as much somehow. I guess because she didn’t leave any stains. But Cora’s mom? Is freaking everywhere up there. Some of her stuff is in boxes but a lot of it is just out: photos held to the wall by the vanity with crumbling yellow tape, a lifetime of junk jewelry that I guess isn’t Cora’s style because it’s collecting dust up here, scattered all over the tables. Clothes in the closet, smelling slightly off the way things do after a lifetime of wear. When you close your eyes, that scent becomes a physical thing, snaking out from under the door.

Anyway, I’m not surprised that I fell asleep downstairs instead. Sitting at the piano is way more comfortable than that bedroom. It’s maybe the only nice thing about this whole situation.

Right now my pants are . . . definitely not comfortable. Jesus. I am so glad that Cora’s out getting her groceries and the mail, which for some reason she doesn’t trust the postman to leave on the doorstep, even though she is always here and says howdy to everyone, like you can’t avoid her, and she would obviously know, like, immediately if the USPS guy stopped by—

Whatever. Maybe she just wants something to do. How else is she going to fill her days? She can't bake all the time.

I take a long breath. Then another. That song is still . . . ringing in the back of my mind. Like a bell. 

I put my fingers on the keys.

I know it sounds crazy? But I can tell right away that I didn’t write this. Not even my sleeping, subconscious brain. I like fast stuff, fun music. Boogie-woogie, tunes that make people laugh and try to clap along, even though I swear that like half of them don’t know what rhythm is. Plus lately most of _my_ songs just feel like unfinished riffs. 

But this is a whole piece, point and counterpoint already laid out. I start to hum the melody, up over what my fingers are playing. And the words just— 

Come to me. 

_I —  
put my head down  
Pocked on the pillow  
Pockets full of pills  
As if mixing our medications  
Might bring you to me  
Or give me a thrill._

_And the seconds of my life  
Tick by  
Unnoticed  
While I lie in bed  
Gazing at the wall  
And the moonbeams in the corners  
Reflect  
Imaginary splendors  
‘til I pull down the shade  
To disperse them all . . ._

  
Then the lyrics spin off into nothing again, covered up with chords and flourishes. When the song ends I just sit there, feeling slack and stupid. Like I’ve just come, and now my body doesn’t know what to do with itself anymore. A wire without a current. 

I look up, and for some reason I expect to see Luke standing at the kitchen sink. Looking at me. The way he did on the day when we saved Cora’s kitchen from burning up. 

Luke isn’t there, though.

\-----

Sidebar? But Luke is _not_ the reason I keep spinning my wheels here in Cleveland. Well, ok, he kind of is. Just . . . not that way.

I haven’t seen Luke since the rally. 

Which is impressive, right? Like, until this week we were living right _fucking_ next door to each other, if you can call it that. We’re still on the same block. And I’m at Emily’s as often as I’m over here. _Plus_ he knows where I work. I mean, the guy doesn’t even have curtains, how hard can he be to catch?

Very hard, apparently. Ridiculously. Which. That tracks, I guess.

Sometimes I think I see a guy that looks like him across the street, standing under a tree, where the shadows dapple everything so it’s impossible to tell if his skin’s bruised or not. Or I smell him: smoke and cheap warm soap. But then I spin around, or almost get myself killed running into traffic, and it’s nothing, every time. 

He hasn’t stopped updating his instagram. It’s something? At least I know he’s not _dead_ or whatever. But the shots are almost all close-ups, and when there are backgrounds they’re all places that I don’t recognize at all. Every time I think something like that I feel all creepy-stalkery, like some . . . wet wad of hair lurking halfway down a shower drain, waiting for the next flood so I can stick a couple of tendrils up through the metal grate and grab onto his toes.

I sigh, and I close the lid on the piano. 

Only then I realize, sitting there with my hands on time-smoothed wood, that _holy shit I just had another fish dream._

I get up. I kick into my shoes real fast and I grab my jacket from where it’s hanging on Cora’s honest-to-god coat rack, and I tear three lots over to the vacant house. Luke’s house. 

But it’s empty.

\----

I don’t know . . . exactly how I can say for sure that it’s empty? I mean, it always was. It’s an _vacant house._ But even before I go up on the porch something just feels different. Bigger. Blanker. Like when you hold a bulb that’s burned out and even though it was already the lightest thing in the world somehow you can just tell. Even if you can’t see it that that little filament is snapped and it’s never going to be anything bigger than itself ever again. It’s just somebody’s mistake, a burned-out shell stuck back in the box instead of being thrown in the garbage. 

I check anyway. The door opens under my touch, hinges smooth as an oil slick. 

I walk through every empty room. I even open up the closets, although the idea of Luke hanging up his little thongs and wash-worn t-shirts is . . . laughable. 

Nothing. 

I come back outside. Even though that building is just blocks of empty oxygen stacked in the shape of rooms, I still feel like I need fresh air. 

\----

And there he is. 

\----

Luke is leaning against the open door of a car. Driver’s side. For some reason I hadn’t pictured him as having a license, just his fake IDs. But there’s nobody else around and he looks super comfortable, the keys dangling from his fingers with a flash of silver when the light hits them. I still say it though, because it’s the first stupid thing that pops into my head:

“I didn’t know you had a car.”

“Oh . . . yeah.” He smiles, shy, like he’s a girl at the mall trying on a dress she really, really loves, but she’s afraid that her friends are about to judge the shit out of her for it. It’s sweet. “I do now.”

He touches the top of the car like he’s not totally sure his hand is going to make contact. Like I did in my dream. In all my dreams, actually, always feeling up the ribs of my own improbable-to-be-shared fantasies. And then he says:

“You want a ride back to New York?”

**Author's Note:**

> _I came with the last of the apples,  
>  Ladies and Northern Spies.  
> I came for the wild of a town you knew  
> So well that it was not wild._
> 
> _We are living like some of the youngest  
>  Like fingers in a fist[...] _
> 
> _We could walk right out  
>  We could walk right out  
> We could walk right out_  
>    
> — Dane Terry  
>  (of course.)


End file.
